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Show Study links cancer, radiation ionine and cystine, would make good "mops" for cleaning up excess ex-cess radicals before they caused damage. "There is probably some sense, along with all the nonsense, in the organic food fad-but I'm not touting Henry Eyring's Health Cure, just making a scientific observation." ob-servation." Use of sulphur-amino or sulphu-selenium compounds could add from 7 to 10 years on the average life span according to subsequent research. Additional information is being learned each day. "The key to greater longevity seems to be to avert chromosome damage by avoiding exposure to substances that produce such damage. If that can be achieved, a man of 70 could theoretically be as healthy as a boy of seven. But as it stands today, you can be certain that if something else doesn't kill you first, you will eventually die of cancer." Dr Betsy Stover watched dying beagles for 20 years. Ac a part of a research program in tituled in 1950 under the aus-1 aus-1 es of Dr. T.F. Dougherty, hairman of the Department of Anatomy and the head of the Division of Radiobiology, Dr. Stover Sto-ver observed the long-term effects of irradiation on a large experimental experi-mental population of the dogs, a species with a known high resistance resis-tance to bone-marrow cancer (osteosarcoma). Bone-marrow cancer and leukemia are the two major degenerative effects of irradiation. By subjecting subject-ing her experimental canines to varying exposures of two radioactive radio-active isotopes, plutonium 239 and radium 226, and comparing the numbers and types of deaths to a control population of beagles isolated from exposure to nonsurvival non-survival due to irradiation, trauma, trau-ma, accident, disease, parasites, nutritional deficienies, epilepsy and readily operable cancers (such as cancer of the skin), Dr. Stover discovered that the distribution of deaths by irradiation, in the case of lower dosages, is similar to the distribution of natural deaths except ex-cept in the matter of time. Because death occurred for similar reasons, but much more rapidly in the irradiated dogs, the mechanism mechan-ism by which dogs naturally age and die is accelerated by irradiation. irradia-tion. If this mechanism could be isolated, a new and possibly essential es-sential key to the process of aging would be uncovered. :To determine the precise nature of this mechanism, Dr. Stover took her (by now quite massive) experimental datum to Dr. Henry Eyring, distinguished professor of : chemistry, professor of metallurgy, metal-lurgy, adjunct professor of physics and an eminent scientist whose work on reaction rated in biological biologi-cal processes is considered to be of first importance to the extension exten-sion of knowledge in the life sciences. By applying mathematical mathema-tical tools derived from his reaction-rate theories to the case of Dr. Stover's beagles, Dr. Eyring isolated the aging mechanism and with Dr. Stover, formulated a general theory to account for the effects of degenerative aging. The aging process elucidated by Dr. Stover and Eyring is a relatively rela-tively simple one. Free radicals, that is, "hungry" charged sub-molecular sub-molecular groups of atoms looking look-ing for more complete compounds to tie into, particularly OH radicals radi-cals (such as those formed when water in the' body is split up by radioactive bombardment) tie into the chromosomes of normal cells, and, because they occupy sites reserved for genes, produce incomplete in-complete or nonfunctional cells. As the process continues, large numbers of cells become impaired, im-paired, useless or even harmful, as in the case of cancerous growth. This gradual depletion of the body's cellular reserves is the process pro-cess called aging. There are certain obvious conclusions conclu-sions one draw from these premises: prem-ises: primarily, that cancer probably has a genetic etiology and is not caused by an infectious microbe; secondarily, that cutting down the amount of free radical substances in the body will promote pro-mote longer lifespans. The first conclusion is of great importance to those researchers seeking a cancer can-cer cure because it narrows the field of possible research considerably; consid-erably; the second is of interest to almost anyone who wants to live longer and remain sound in health. Dr. Eyring notes that there are many free-radical substances in common use, among them coffee and sodium nitrate (a meat preservative), preser-vative), and that free radicals are a natural by-product of normal metabolic met-abolic processes in the human body. He comments that certain compounds, such as the sulphur-containing sulphur-containing amino acids meth- |